During the 20% off sale, the high end stock is gone in a few minutes. Buyers snatch as many as they can afford and later sell them on ebay or craigs list. Thousands can be sold in nothing flat. I doubt that the 70-200 2.8 MK II lasted 5 minutes.

During the 20% off sale, the high end stock is gone in a few minutes. Buyers snatch as many as they can afford and later sell them on ebay or craigs list. Thousands can be sold in nothing flat. I doubt that the 70-200 2.8 MK II lasted 5 minutes.

Oh I know that, I keep that page open all day during sales

But I was saying, the listings are all gone. Normally it just says "sold out". All L's are gone, the 17-55 f2.8, the top flashes, the 5DII...

Maybe because of the high-volume of traffic, they've slimmed the website down to run faster with everyone clicking 'refresh' every 5 minutes.Less data to process and transfer means less bandwidth needed.

Canon does this occasionally. The last time was last spring following a similar sale.

It looks like they have now restored most of the pages, although most items remain out of stock.

I suspect they just pull the pages at some point to re-assess what items to continue offering, maybe look at what is in the supply chain and determine if there are items they need to drop. Like many things about the Refurbished Store, it's all kind of mysterious to me.

Canon does this occasionally. The last time was last spring following a similar sale.

It looks like they have now restored most of the pages, although most items remain out of stock.

I suspect they just pull the pages at some point to re-assess what items to continue offering, maybe look at what is in the supply chain and determine if there are items they need to drop. Like many things about the Refurbished Store, it's all kind of mysterious to me.

Yes, they seem to do this during sales when most everything is out of stock. Sometimes, popular products do not come back for weeks.